Many companies and projects are developing their own JSON based
representations of email which are proprietary, non-standard, and
incompatible with each other. These protocols are proliferating due
to existing standards being insufficient or poorly suited to the
environments they are operating in, particularly mobile and webmail.
The JMAP working group will specify an mechanism to allow clients to
both view and send email from a server over a single stateless HTTPS
channel with minimal round trips. The protocol will support
out-of-band signaling of changes, and will give mobile clients
significant benefits in terms of battery life and network usage.
The use of multiple protocols to perform actions within a single
application creates significant support challenges, as users may get a
variety of partial failure modes (for example, can receive email, but
can not send new messages). This is further exacerbated if the
different protocols are authenticated separately.
The work of this group is limited to developing a protocol for a client
synchronising data with a server. Any server-to-server issues or
end-to-end encryption of messages are out of scope for this working
group.
The working group will coordinate with the Security Area on credential
management and authentication.
Input to working group discussions shall include:
- Internet Message Format [RFC 5322]
- CONDSTORE and QRESYNC [RFC 7162]
- Collection Synchronisation for WebDav [RFC 6578]
- LEMONADE and experiences from adoption of its output
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/lemonade/charter/]
- SMTP SUBMISSION [RFC 4409]
- SMTP BURL [RFC 4468]
The working group will deliver the following:
- A problem statement detailing the deployment environment and
situations that motivate work on a new protocol for client to
server email synchronisation. The working group may choose
not to publish this as an RFC.
- A document describing an extensible protocol and data structures which
supports stateless use, flood control and batched operations.
- A document describing how to use the extensible protocol over HTTPS
with the data structures expressed as JSON.
- A document describing a data model for email viewing, management,
searching, and submission on top of the extensible protocol.
- An executable test suite and documented test cases to assist
developers of JMAP servers to ensure they conform to the
specifications.